February 16, 2000

CYBERCOLUMN:
Questions about prayer
___I've been thinking a lot about prayer lately. I've always envied great prayer warriors because I don't think I'm one of them. I've envied them when they said they spent more of their prayer time listening than asking.
___Someone asked Mother Teresa how she grew so close to God, and she replied it was from hours and hours of prayer. The questioner asked, "What do you pray for?" and Mother Teresa replied, "I listen."
___How did she do that? Do people just sit around listening to God? What I mean is, if I

BERRY SIMPSON

heard him talking out loud, of course I would listen. All day long. But whenever I tried to pray by listening, I simply sat in silence, stewing in my own thoughts and wondering if I'd recognize God's voice when I heard it.
___We recently studied one of my favorite chapters from the New Testament, 1 John 5. The Apostle John wrote about prayer in verse 14, "If we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And ... we know that we have what we asked of him."
___To me, that has always sounded like a disclaimer, as if God were saying, "I'm not responsible for unanswered prayer if the pray-er is not in my will."
___Is prayer a guessing game where our objective is to keep praying until we finally hit on God's will? Is God telling us that if we pray for what he was going to do anyway, then, after we pray, sure enough he will do it?
___I don't really believe that's what he meant; God loves us too much to be so petty. But prayer is hard to understand sometimes.
___Cyndi and I went to a spiritual renewal weekend called Stream in the Desert, and the speaker told of a time he and a circle of believers were gathered at a friend's house who had just been diagnosed with cancer, and they were all there to pray for their friend to be healed. The speaker said he looked around the room and remembered the other times that same group had gathered to do this very thing for other friends who subsequently died from illness and others whose marriages broke in spite of the prayer. He wondered why they even bothered. One of his members even voiced his prayer, "Lord, we come to you with a bad track record ..."
___If we look at our own life history, or even the history of people we know who are great people of prayer, we'll find God doesn't always give us whatever we ask. It doesn't happen very often. Are we out of his will that much, that often?
___Well, to start with, if the only reason we come to God in prayer is to get stuff, or make things happen, we are missing the most important part. Prayer teaches us what God is like, and in fact, teaches us what we are like. Through the process of discovering God's character and our own character, we grow more and more like him. As we do, our will conforms to his will, and we will find ourselves praying in God's will--not because we got lucky enough to land on it--but because we have become more like God. That is what I believe.
___I also believe we should always pray our heart's desire to God even if we don't know his will about the matter. Don't hesitate; pray all the time. If we wait until we are smart enough or spiritual enough to pray "in his will," we'll never pray. The process of praying helps lead us to his will. We should take advantage of the fact the God of the universe wants us to approach him in prayer and do it all the time. The more we pray, the more our ways become like his ways and the more our will becomes like his will.
___One day, when I was out running, it occurred to me that I heard the voice of God all the time. And much to my surprise, I heard him mostly when I was running. Not because running is a spiritual activity, but because my mind goes into neutral when I run. It is the one time of my day when I'm not busy in my head. And many times God has taken advantage of that to speak to me. I was praying by listening, but I wasn't bright enough to understand what I was doing.
___I don't believe we ever will reach a sufficient level of spiritual understanding when everything we pray for will come true. In fact, if that is really our goal, we're not growing very much like God at all.
___1 John 5:20 says that one of the reasons God, in Christ, came to earth was so that we could know him. That is good news; he wants us to know him. One of the ways we know him is through constant prayer.

___Berry Simpson, a Sunday School teacher at First Baptist Church in Midland, is a petroleum engineer and mayor pro-tem of the city of Midland.




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